edward hopper at the art institute of chicago

i believe this show was previously in new york, maybe at the whitney, not sure. in any case it was a great surprise to me. i guess in my mind i had reduced hopper in my mental data bank to the usual "painter of empty spaces", "cerebral", "cold" yada yada. he is a painter of empty spaces and he is cerebral but what surprised me were the colors. they just pop out of the paintings and a good many of them are even luscious. i think it has to do with the arrangement of the pictures and the way they painted the walls. they used greyish, brownish colors. the exhibit completely changed my understanding of hopper. well ok, maybe it just added another layer. but how cool. maybe the association of colors and empty spaces is central to him. the paintings in the last room look downright contemporary. for some reason some of them made me think of luc tuymans. haven't figured out that one yet.

"last room look downright contemporary" Might that be because his compositions are firmely built on the abstract?

i wasn't thinking about the composition, although that too is important. i was thinking more in terms of the sensibility. he is definitively interested in anonymity. hopper doesn't individuate but creates very generic figures.there is a willful restraint that relates him to a lot of what was done after pop art. the difference would be i guess that he depicts this anonymity whereas post pop artists tried to embody it.

some of the latter paintings look very staged too. very much about the artifice but in a cinematic way. very bill viola.

if i had to relate him to any abstract artist i would relate him to the diebenkorn of the ocean park paintings. they are very airy, maritime.

thanks for the opportunity to ramble. hehehe.

I am looking at Hopper's Eleven a.m. and I understand your referance to cinematic artifice. I see a curving number 4 that is her body (in pumps!) against a world of layered rectangles. One has the option of inventing/imposing a meaning of exposed isolation, for example. Or you can accept that this is just the annonomus artist model posed to be the point of interest in the artist's composition. Still in the history of modern art it relates more to Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stine than to photorealism like Estes's Nedick's

and I thank you for responding it's been a long time since I touched the world of art.

thats is a great painting. actually the paintings in the last room of the exhibition, were works done in the 50's and early 60's. those are the ones that have the sensibility i was talking about. they are very reminiscent of post pop figuration.

It's nice to be 'hearing' a discussion about this. Contemporary art, in general, is an area of ignorance for me, but I thought the Hopper exhibition was fabulous. The color really is a strong point. It's an interesting counter to the anonymity, spareness, loneliness, and ambiguity of the work, generally. - As if something so bright and brilliant were a warmth balancing all that social and emotional coolness. While I couldn't say much about it intelligently, I do love the structure and shapes in his paintings.

Apologies for interjecting - and thanks for letting me eavesdrop!

My bad. I'll have to see if the university library has a catalogue of the show. I no longer live in Chicago. Hi Eurydice. You are very welcome. I wish I could go see the show.

I was fortunate to be visiting when it opened. The catalogue's beautiful. I was given a copy, kindly and wisely, by the friend who took me.